Bright Circle and Shadows Beneath
by code epic
Summary: Theoretically, an instant and an eternity are identical to a sealed sorceress. A dark, Rinoa-centric one-shot.


Disclaimer: I do not own Final Fantasy VIII. Rinoa and all other characters belong to Squaresoft. I make no money from this. Insert witty comment here.

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"Bright Circle and Shadows Beneath" by code epic.

Rating: PG.

Word Count: Approx. 2,500.

Warnings: Sorcery-based violence.

Spoilers: Takes place between Disc Three and the end of the game.

Archive: Ask, and ye probably shall receive.

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**Bright Circle and Shadows Beneath**

_I saw Eternity the other night  
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,  
All calm as it was bright,  
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years  
Driven by the spheres  
Like a vast shadow moved . . ._

- Andrew Marvell, "The World"

-

She woke up screaming at the world.

She opened her eyes and men caught fire. She breathed and they fell to the ground, choking and burning inside their armor. She flexed her fingers and the earth surged. Buildings crashed to the ground in a hail of plastic and crystal as the city tore itself apart all around her.

She looked to one side and there was another woman entombed in a capsule like hers. She was waking also, stirring her head and uncrossing her arms from over her chest.

She looked at those inhuman arms rent by purple scars and warped muscles, and remembered the feel of them _pulling_ her forward. Then the woman opened her own claret eyes, one brilliant lock of orange hair tumbling between them, and the memory of a horrific fusion shot up her spine.

She brought her arm down sideways, spitting out syllables in a language she did not recall learning, just as the woman noticed her. Adel had no time to utter a sound before she burst into violet flames.

-

She screamed and no sound came out, for she was inside another's mind, an observer suspended motionless like a fly trapped within a drop of amber.

The golden ball fell back into Ellone's small hands, and she flung it up again into the sterile air while across the laboratory Dr. Odine blustered on.

"Sorceress Adel has no appreciation for pure science." He twitched, indignant, in front of a recording screen. "Just think of all ze potential zeories zat could be proved or disproved by one five-minute test. A chance to grasp ze fundamental nature of time itself, is zis not precisely vat ze Sorceress seeks?"

He paused dramatically for the imaginary listener, then threw his garish sleeves ceilingward. "But not if it means being a test subject again, evidently! No appreciation at all . . ."

The ball tumbled through the air over and over again, followed by Ellone's lively eyes, tracing out a parabola governed by the same immutable laws that move the spheres in their waltzing paths around the sun.

"A simple extension of my GF confinement devices, adjusted to ze biosignature of a sorceress. Ze effect being total isolation, all external influence rendered null: sealed, like a fly vithin a drop of amber. Outside space and time. Vat might one find over zere?"

The ball reached its apogee once more, and in the harsh fluorescent light it glittered.

"Vat might a sorceress find over zere? Zeoretically, an instant and an eternity vould be identical to a sealed sorceress. But, only zeoretically, for now." Dr. Odine's chin dropped onto his wide collar.

"Classic geometry is predicated on ze notion zat space is flat," he said, thoughtful. "But for time, ze ancients could merely come up vit a river zat cannot be measured and an arrow zat never reaches its target." He reached out to turn the recorder off.

"Oh, and we can't forget zat race in vich a tortoise beats ze great Vascaroon." Dr. Odine's face twisted into a sneer of disapproval, then his hand came down finally with a click. The screen fizzled into blackness, only the gold smear of the ball left reflected in it.

"Hmph. Most unscientific."

-

She woke up and she wanted to scream.

She looked up at the woman kneeling over her and she wanted her to burn, even though her pale face framed by long black hair was sad and beautiful. But when she opened her mouth to draw forth the words of power, a parched moan was all that was left.

"I . . . can't . . . disappear yet." _Dont remember your childhood fithos lusec the sensations and feelings wecos vinosec dont remember them oh Hyne_ **dont** _or youll_

Then she noticed the young man. He stood off to one side behind the sad woman. He held before him Lion Heart, the sword upon which the world had ended, in a stance that was almost careless in its easy perfection. Even half-masked by a fall of sable hair, his eyes transfixed her.

When she looked further, helplessly drawn, she realized it was because trapped under their gray flatness were images of the cataclysm they had just passed through. Cosmos and times and minds breaking, shattering across the whole spectrum of reality until everything was white, a desert of scorching white that she had traversed, walking for miles and years while weighed down by wings of what had felt like iron as civilizations rose and melt, glass-delicate, along the impossible horizon, to find, to find -

-

**_Klassic geometry is predikated on the notion that spake is flat. Henke, an infinite line will kut akross the universe in a straight path without ever meeting its starting point. It will just go on forever._**

From her throat Ultimecia shapes each word as if it is a great slab of marble, to be laid down alongside other blocks of words until they become the foundation for an immense castle of marble rising dark and dense into the sky's underbelly even when, irresistibly, they dissolve into limpid outlines of aery minarets that spin and yaw ecstastically upon the outpouring of glory from the endless ring above, so full of light it seems more like an upturned bowl holding the fire of a thousand seraphs' souls.

**_We now know that notion is false. Spake kurves, and time along with it. An infinite line drawn akross the universe must eventually return to its starting point, forming a klosed kircle._**

At the centerless center they stand, radiant disk huge and profound over their heads, while far beneath their feet shadows darker than Ultimecia's own wings revolve.

**_This is eternity._** She lifts her face, baring the column of her neck to Rinoa. Pearly shafts of light spill down her blighted cheeks like water. **_A klosed kircle made by an infinite line, enkompassing the whole kosmos._**

Slowly she lowers her gaze again. Her fractured gold eyes, Rinoa realizes now, are prisms reflecting only obscurely the lucent brilliance all around the two women. Ultimecia is steeped in the infinite.

**_This is perfektion._** One alabaster hand etches a sharp arc to illustrate their surroundings, and for a dizzying moment Rinoa thinks Ultimecia can mean either eternity or the sweep of her own arm. **_But even a perfekt thing kasts a shadow, and eternity's shadow is time itself._**

Just then she becomes aware of the shadows murmuring below. They have been murmuring all along: an undulating, hazy noise not so much like a roomful of clocks ticking as more like the rapid shuffling of a storm of calendar sheets, the knife drop of days shredding years and the seasons seeping in through between the resultant tears.

**_Time Kompression is merely a matter of kompressing this kircle down to a one-dimensional point. A point kannot kast a shadow. Take away eternity, and take away time. Take away time, and one is free to unlink past from future, kause from effekt, you from me._**

Coldness crashes over Rinoa. Above them eternity wheels on in upon itself, unaware and inexorable, while Ultimecia is shifting and growing obscure like a memory remembered in dreams only, ghosts of used-up centuries passing as a dark wind over her form. Only it is not her that is changing under the remorseless gaze of perpetuity, but merely Rinoa's own perception.

The last of the centuries fall away, revealing what has always been there. Hair bleached by the passing eons, wing feathers blackened over the turning epochs, grief and hate bled out onto her face from innumerable ages of brooding. The eyes that mirror infinity, eyes that are perfectly level with Rinoa's own.

Time has already compressed Ultimecia. It has pressurized her flesh into diamond and hammered her soul into a thin burning wire so that standing before Rinoa now is a hard, avaricious thing.

Her heart lurches hollowly inside her chest, and she feels inexpressibly lonely. "But I, you're . . . But Squall's sword will pierce your heart."

At the name Ultimecia's face instantly takes on _such_ an expression. The one syllable surges from her, low and elemental and bitter in a tenor that grinds against the marrow all through Rinoa's body, as if she has never said anything else in her long life.

**_Skwall._**

Just as suddenly, her face is an impenetrable and beautiful mask again. She smiles thinly, pomegrante-dark lips twisting into the smile of an entity who has decided it will be more powerful than physics. Then she speaks one more time, enigmatically, almost conversationally.

**_I woke up skreaming at the world._**

And Ultimecia walks away across the floorboards of eternity, leaving behind her shadow.

-

She woke up screaming for the moon to turn into a torrent of blood, and it obeyed.

"Rinoa and Adel, the sorceresses as one - that is Ultimecia's _wish."_

The knight, defeated and desperate, threw the girl at her as monsters rained down all around outside Lunatic Pandora. She opened her arms to embrace the girl, thick claws curling toward her.

She drew her lips over her teeth to laugh, glorying in the feel of motion regained, but just then the girl's head lolled to one side and dark hair spilled back from her face. Purple flames were licking at her temples.

Suddenly, the girl's slim hands were hot irons where they cruelly grasped her wrists. She struggled to throw her off, and she should have, for had she not killed ten thousand men to gain their strength and had she not enslaved a hundred thousand more men to build her city, but the girl's rage was now far beyond the reach of physics.

Time is fearfully broken here, its contradictions filling the air with hideous tension, and it was her mistress' scream when she woke up to a changed world that cleaved it in two. Standing alone amid the translucent ruins of a once-great city, she resolved to deny all existence and began by razing SeeD from the face of the earth like the swarming locusts they were. In the last moments of their vile lives they trembled at the sound of her new name echoing like wrath under the barren sky. Then he came back for her after all, but time still remembers how she woke up screaming at the world for abandoning her.

The girl hissed, "Even if I end up as the world's enemy, he said he would be my knight."

Time still remembers how he vowed that he would wait for her and that she would find him if she came to him, but she walked for miles and years, bowed down by leaden wings, across a desert that was an ocean of white fire with strange empires shimmering in the distance, only to find at the end that time no longer trusts what it remembers. He did not come back for her and time's memories have twisted themselves into a knot, so that it was simple for her to crush all the eons together and break causality, stepping through the rupture into their future as her own timeline collapsed behind her because he came back for her.

"Promises. Prediktions. Prophekies. Kurse them all." The girl's eyes, chocolate brown blooming into terrible gold, flickered to over her shoulder. "Oh, behind you."

She spun around and that rebel idiot Loire shoved her backward into the force field, and her heart clenched as time pressed in on all around her.

-

She could not scream and the young man kept looking at her with those cold metal-gray eyes that, she knew now, would not burn even if Hyne herself turned all the oceans in the world to fire.

Heavy on her own arm was the sad woman's hand as she said, for the first or second or thousandth time, in a broken whisper, "I . . . can't . . . disappear yet."

_Forced at gunpoint by Squalls sword future is cause past is effect and I have yet to fully unlink myself from her I need more time just _

let me **hold** _on just if I can_

But already eternity was swallowing her up, the great circle sweeping her violently from the sad woman's hand on her arm and up into its light-drenched orbit, even as the sorcery boiled out through her skin like so much dew vapor, and then the only thing left for her to do was watch his gray eyes slide away under a vast brightness.

-

She woke up with a gasp.

His pale gray eyes regarded her. In the dim, harshly lit chamber, they were both cloudy and transparent, as if they could have held any emotion now.

"Are you all right, Rinoa?"

His hand ran along her arm, graceful and precise. Not an ounce of pressure above or below the necessary through the leather glove. She waited a moment to let the weight sink into her muscles.

When she nodded, he helped her out of the capsule. "The Ragnarok's outside. Take your time." He let go of her hands and took a step back. He glanced to one side, unruly bangs falling across the bridge of his nose and hiding his scar. "I'm glad."

Another unnamable look, then he was striding back to his duty, followed by Irvine and the girls. Selphie stole a glance over her shoulder at her, and got her wrist rapped by Quistis. Zell waved them goodbye, shrugged, and jammed his hands into the pockets of his shorts. He shot Rinoa a grin that tried too hard to be casual.

"You know, he couldn't leave you in there for even a day," the blond told her in a warm, conspiratorial tone like he was remembering a private joke shared between them two. The soles of his sneakers squeaked as he shuffled his feet. "He came back immediately."

Rinoa smiled. Her face felt brittle.

"Immediately," she said. Her throat was hoarse, perhaps as if she had been screaming for a very long time. "Of course."

She turned and walked toward the exit of the Sorceress Memorial, feet quiet against the floor.

-

A/N: In-game script bits gratefully taken from Oliver Kong's FFVIII Game Script. Inspiration is due Baconfat for the latest installment"chain of thought" in her consistently awesome Adel series, and magistrate for her equally awesome "Magic."

Many thanks to the following for taking the time to review my FFnet fics: Verdanii, Sheep, Hikari Heijin, Kitian, DK, and Lucrecia LeVrai for "Under the Blue Light;" The RyRy and Alana Hikari-Chan for "Metronome;" magistrate (and HighSchool Fanpoodle From Hell) and The RyRy for "Through A Mirror Darkly."

Reviews, feedback, and flames are appreciated. More of my writing can be found on my LJ under Memories, which is linked to in my author profile.


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